Tuesday, May 31, 2016

Thank you to everyone who came out to help and participate with FoodWhat?! for the 2016 Strawberry Blast Festival. It wouldn't have been this amazing if it wasn't for all of our partn

ers and youth! The Blast was planned and organized by two FoodWhat 2015 alumni, Manuel and Grace, who put on another bangin event. On Friday May 27th we welcomed 300 local high school and middle school students to the FoodWhat at the UCSC farm for a day of farm, health, and youth empowerment-based activities! The event gave youth the unique opportunity to trace a strawberry from field to plate and learned about how our local food system works! It also taught youth about food justice and real facts about the food we consume through a variety of workshops and hands-on activities, such as The Food Justice Wall, "What You Drink, What You Think", Fast Food Jeopardy, Trace Your Taco, and much more!! Students experienced how to grow their own food, harvested farm fresh organic strawberries, and dove into preparing and eating tasty healthy food like strawberry tarts and smoothies! It turned out to be such a fun and educational festival! Until next year!!

We started the day by each picking a few berries. Extra delicious when they are freshly picked.

Then we got to participate in a bunch of activities and stations.

What you Drink, What you Think...

FoodWhat Jr Staff, Aaliyah led a workshop aboutprocessed sugar in popular beverages and how youth can exercisetheir power by choosing what to spend their $$ on

FoodWhat Alum, Victoria taught people about guerrilla gardening by making Seed Bombs

The Community AgroecologyNetwork (CAN) led a workshopabout the benefits of Fair Tradeand direct market transactionswith farmers

And the favorite... Strawberry smoothies!

Many thanks to local farms Live Earth, Dirty Girl, UCSCand Jacobs Farm for providing extra berries for the event!

Thanks to Straus Family Creameryfor donating milk and yogurt --YUM!

Button Making with Subject to Change from the MAH

Watsonville Wetlands Watch

Trace your Taco:

FoodWhat Alum, Uriel, led a workshop about food systems byexamining all the ingredients in a Taco Bell taco(above) students act out what its like for cows in a CAFO(Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation)

Thursday, May 26, 2016

FIN! We cannot believe that our Spring Internship at FoodWhat?! has come to an end! It is a bitter sweet moment for all of us because this program truly motivated and inspired each and everyone of us to be the best we can be! We have come along way since the start of the internship and we couldn't have done it on our own without the help of our amazing facilitators! So thank you guys so much for allowing us to be apart of this amazing welcoming space! On that note, lets dive in to our last weekly doings at FoodWhat?! We first started off our day with a three-legged race! The olympic game was toooo wild, that we couldn't decide on a genuine winner...but all in all, it was a fun icebreaker! WE then moved on to the kitchen where we finally go to prep our pizza dough and pizza toppings (it's a receipt we've been waiting for since the beginning of the internship...lol)! While we waited for the dough to rise, we headed out to the farm where we did our last of garden work! We covered potatoes with more soil to give it more nutrients! We then worked on our resumes! It was extremely helpful for the majority of us because we've never created one until now! We all now have professional resumes we can use for future job openings! We then found our way back into the kitchen where we placed veggie toppings on our pizza dough and popped our pizza into an outdoor wood fire...the smokiness really gave our pizza that authentic Italian taste! After eating our delicious pizza, we were handed our perfect attendants award, our checks, a FoodWhat?! tee-shirt, and a FoodWhat?! bracelet. With our tee-shirt, bracelets, and 11 week experience, we will never forget the personal growth we developed at FoodWhat?!

FoodWhat Olympics:

Prepping Pizza Toppings and making the dough

A little bit of farm work while the dough is rising...

we hilled potatoes

We evaluated the program and how we grew and changed over the last 11 weeks...